Aug 6, 2026 · 1 hr 2 min · 9 segments
Nora, Imogen, and Helen are joined by friend of the pod Ashley to discuss two articles from the new volume of Mediations: Emma Heaney's "On the Cisness of the Bourgeoisie" and Amy De'Ath's "Two…
What, if you want to, if you want to go ahead, what were your thoughts on the Emma Heaney piece?
So having read a little bit of Emma Heaney prior, I'm familiar with her work, The New Woman, which concerns modernism and the figure of the trans woman there and her investment in the concept of cisness and critique of it.
A lot of work in this vein and a lot of what I've read of Heaney revolves around Well, ultimately, the organizing force of cisness, of the idea of a coherent set of traits that are fixed and imputed onto subjects through mechanisms beyond just the kind of medical process of assignation, right? Which is, I think, often a common...
issue or a way it gets talked about that gender assignment or the purported coherence of sex is solely sort of a medical thing that then becomes taken up culturally or in child rearing, et cetera.
And I think Keeney's perspective in this piece and elsewhere is a nice corrective to that sort of way of framing cisness as a primarily medical phenomenon.
And she expands it out across this piece to include a lot of what is typically understood as the sex-gender system, things... including labor distribution, reproductive labor, aspects of aesthetics and presentation, that sort of thing.
So here it was a lot of elaboration on thoughts that I had read of hers elsewhere.
And I found it not uncomplicatedly useful, but there were a lot of moments that I think were productive.
And I think we maybe can get into some of the particular areas where maybe her framework is generative or maybe it doesn't quite work, et cetera, as we go on.
I feel like at least I personally was less than sanguine about this piece.
And I think the reason why is that I felt that I had a lot of the same issues as the Endnotes piece that we discussed for episode 22.
And for those of you who are listening to this episode without having listened to number 22, first of all, go listen to that episode first.
Second of all, the main criticisms I think that are applicable here that applied to the Endnotes piece were that It focuses too narrowly in some respects and too broadly in others.
And then also that it seems to try to reinvent categories that already exist.
And it doesn't seem like there's that much theoretical yield that at least I was able to suss out by replacing sort of the Foucaultian categories, which Heaney brings up with the terms or the categories that she's trying to sort of add to it.
What, if you want to, if you want to go ahead, what were your thoughts on the Emma Heaney piece?
So having read a little bit of Emma Heaney prior, I'm familiar with her work, The New Woman, which concerns modernism and the figure of the trans woman there and her investment in the concept of cisness and critique of it.
A lot of work in this vein and a lot of what I've read of Heaney revolves around Well, ultimately, the organizing force of cisness, of the idea of a coherent set of traits that are fixed and imputed onto subjects through mechanisms beyond just the kind of medical process of assignation, right? Which is, I think, often a common...
issue or a way it gets talked about that gender assignment or the purported coherence of sex is solely sort of a medical thing that then becomes taken up culturally or in child rearing, et cetera.
And I think Keeney's perspective in this piece and elsewhere is a nice corrective to that sort of way of framing cisness as a primarily medical phenomenon.
And she expands it out across this piece to include a lot of what is typically understood as the sex-gender system, things... including labor distribution, reproductive labor, aspects of aesthetics and presentation, that sort of thing.
So here it was a lot of elaboration on thoughts that I had read of hers elsewhere.
And I found it not uncomplicatedly useful, but there were a lot of moments that I think were productive.
And I think we maybe can get into some of the particular areas where maybe her framework is generative or maybe it doesn't quite work, et cetera, as we go on.
I feel like at least I personally was less than sanguine about this piece.
And I think the reason why is that I felt that I had a lot of the same issues as the Endnotes piece that we discussed for episode 22.
And for those of you who are listening to this episode without having listened to number 22, first of all, go listen to that episode first.
Second of all, the main criticisms I think that are applicable here that applied to the Endnotes piece were that It focuses too narrowly in some respects and too broadly in others.
And then also that it seems to try to reinvent categories that already exist.
And it doesn't seem like there's that much theoretical yield that at least I was able to suss out by replacing sort of the Foucaultian categories, which Heaney brings up with the terms or the categories that she's trying to sort of add to it.
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